Late night on Twitter can be a dark, wormhole of a cave where harassers lurk and trolls attack.

But every once in a while, Twitter brings together a group of people whose exchange discovers something magical – like the revelation that spiders can gaze up at the moon.

This is what happened when Jamie Lomax, an astronomer at the University of Washington, recently tweeted that zebra spiders – also known as jumping spiders – kept crawling out of her office ceiling. Alex Parker, a fellow astronomer, read the tweets and suggested Lomax try lasers to get the spiders to move away from her work area.

Lomax’s colleague, Emily Levesque, had been following the exchange and attempted the laser trick on the spiders in her own office. It worked.

Levesque and Lomax then shared videos of the jumping spiders chasing red and green lasers around like a cat. They wondered how spiders’ eyes worked and Levesque asked Twitter, “Do all zebra spiders react more to green vs red laser pointers? We need some of kind of ‘science Twitter’ bat signal that we can put up when different fields need input from one another.”

Enter Nate Morehouse, a scientist who studies spider vision at the University of Cincinnati.

“We can explain all of this!” Morehouse tweeted. Morehouse was initially headed to bed after watching the Pittsburgh Penguins lose the Stanley Cup final but decided to check Twitter first. “I had like 150 notifications,” he told The Atlantic.

According to Morehouse’s explanation, these types of spiders have eyes like a Galilean telescope. Their two big eyes have a large lens at the top with a long, gel-filled tube underneath. Scientists aren’t totally sure exactly how this works but, at the bottom of the tube, the gel causes light to bend, essentially creating a second lens. Only two other animals have this kind of vision, falcons and chameleons.

Then, inspired by the conversation, Morehouse did a few quick calculations and realized that jumping spiders can see the moon.

The fascinated astronomers added to the synergetic calculations and concluded that jumping spiders probably can’t see Jupiter or Mars, but might be able to make out the Andromeda galaxy. Morehouse added that their vision might not be sensitive enough to see Andromeda but that the ogre-faced spider, another bug-eyed arachnid, can probably definitely see our galaxy’s closet neighbor.

“I had never thought to do the back-of-the-envelope calculations about whether jumping spiders could see the moon,” Morehouse told National Geographic. “And then it was totally fun for me to begin thinking about stargazing spiders and what they would be able to see if they looked up at night. It’s a totally wonderful, fanciful thing.”